Miranda Hart's sitcom has huge appeal because of its childlike innocence – and
essential niceness.

The British have some odd ideas about what constitutes festive entertainment. Typically, the most-watched television programme over the Christmas period isn’t a cuddly animation or a swooning romance or a fireside yarn. It’s EastEnders, whose Yuletide specials traditionally feature death, divorce, adultery and interfamilial warfare. Pass the mince pies, dear. Oh, and that large blunt instrument so I can bludgeon you to a pulp and run off with your brother.

But this Christmas something different happened. Not in EastEnders, obviously – that was the usual dollop of cold misery. What I mean is that this Christmas, EastEnders was only the second most popular programme on television. The most popular – with 10 million viewers to EastEnders’ 9.8 million – was broadcast on BBC One on Boxing Day. It was Miranda.

Yes, that’s Miranda, as in the sitcom about the unusually tall woman who runs a shop and falls over a lot. The sitcom whose record audience before Boxing Day had been 4.4 million. The sitcom that arrived on television only three years ago, having begun life on Radio 2. Improbable as it may sound, this show is suddenly a bigger draw than the bickering catastrophe-magnets of Albert Square. It’s enough to make you turn to camera, Miranda-style, pull a flummoxed gurn and mouth: “How?”

Before going further I should repeat that, as I confessed in my brief review in Thursday’s paper, I’m no great fan of Miranda. This is a lonely position, and not something it’s wise to admit in public. As a conversational gambit at a dinner party, “I don’t actually think Miranda is all that funny” lies somewhere between “I find feet quite sexy, don’t you?” and “Say what you like about Bashar al-Assad, but he has the most immaculate tailoring”.

All the same, I’m fascinated by Miranda as a phenomenon. It isn’t only its success, but its style. Miranda isn’t like any other comedy out there. It’s so… soft. And warm. And I think this softness, this warmth, is the key to it. Watching Miranda is the comedy equivalent of wearing a onesie.

Like those fashionable outsize romper suits that so many adults seem unashamed to lounge around in, Miranda invitingly beckons you back to childhood. It’s cosy and cuddly and comforting. It contains scarcely any jokes that an eight-year-old child wouldn’t get. Its central character – played by Miranda Hart – trips over things, rips her trousers, breaks wind at inopportune moments, pulls faces, puts on funny voices. She’s meant to be in her thirties, yet she’s constantly being scolded by her mother as if she were 12.

To be fair, her mother has a point. In many respects our heroine effectively is 12. She can’t handle the smallest responsibility. She’s clueless about work. She hasn’t the first idea about boys. And she’s hopelessly clumsy, as children on the verge of adolescence so often are.

Thanks to the vogue for films and sitcoms about feckless, immature men (Peep Show, Knocked Up, almost anything starring Jack Black, Simon Pegg or Adam Sandler), we’re all familiar with the concept of the “man-child”. Our heroine in Miranda is a rare instance of the “woman-child”. She’s unfit for the adult world.

Fortunately for her, though, she doesn’t actually have to live in the adult world. Miranda is so remote from reality it makes Mr Bean look like Boys from the Blackstuff. For the first two series our heroine ran, of all things, a joke shop. A joke shop. When’s the last time you went to, or even passed, a joke shop? I’m not sure joke shops actually still exist outside of The Beano, itself a relic of childhood humour, although come to think of it our heroine probably reads it every week.

In Miranda, no one comes to any harm. There’s physical embarrassment, but no psychological humiliation. There’s teasing from mother and friends, but no real cruelty. Our heroine has an on-off relationship with the male friend she fancies, but as heartbreak goes it’s hardly Wuthering Heights. During the Boxing Day episode, when she hugged her best friend, the studio audience actually went, “Awwwww.” Again: Miranda beckons you back to childhood, a time when it felt as if the worst thing that could happen to you was to fall over in the playground in front of your friends.

As for our heroine’s general ineptitude, and lack of money or a proper career… it doesn’t matter. She’s lovable. If Miranda has a message, this is it: it’s OK to be a bit useless, as long as you’re nice.

Niceness is rare in comedy, and not just because most jokes are by their nature unkind, inviting us to laugh at someone else’s expense. Niceness in comedy is also rare facially. Think of Peter Cook, Tony Hancock, John Cleese, Chris Morris, Paul Whitehouse, Harry Enfield, Ricky Gervais, Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman: all very funny, but they have cruel faces. These people look as if they could reduce you to rubble with a single sneer. Not Miranda Hart. She always looks so sweetly perplexed, like a lost doe. She couldn’t hurt you, and in any case wouldn’t want to. If she hurt you even by accident, you feel sure she’d be terribly apologetic.

Miranda is a retreat from cruelty, and from adult life. I’d be surprised if there weren’t a sizeable overlap between adults who watch it and adults who read Harry Potter. Miranda is a children’s programme that just happens to be scheduled at 9pm.

No wonder it went down so well on Boxing Day. Christmas is a time for children, and 10 million grown-ups wanted to remind themselves how that felt.